Authorities had once dismissed the Aryan Brotherhood as a fringe white-supremacist gang; now, however, they concluded that what prisoners had claimed for decades was true--namely, that the gang's hundred or so members, all convicted felons, had gradually taken control of large parts of the nation's maximum-security prisons, ruling over thousands of inmates and transforming themselves into a powerful criminal organization.

An awesomely scary and interesting article (from 2004) describing the formation of the Aryan Brotherhood (which actually took place in prison) and its ascent within the nation's prison systems. The power its members wield both in and out of prison is truly remarkable.